Experimental Ends
by sanspeur
Summary: Everything's fair in experimenting as long as the ends justify the means, right? LizxGrant. Black Sheep Challenge. Complete.


**Experimental Ends**

**by: raineorshine**

**1/1**

**Disclaimer: In no way, shape, or form do I own Gallagher Girls. **

"Who invented kissing?"

Elizabeth Sutton threaded a few fingers through the traitorous blonde strands of hair in her face, neatly tucking them behind her ear as she looked up from her notes. "You expect me to answer that?"

"Well, uh, yeah," a casual smile fell across Grant Harding's face as he drawled lazily, stretching out across the chemistry lab table, revealing a pair of Pokémon socks in the process. She tried not to giggle at his quiet rebellion to his school's uniform. "That's sort of the point of me asking. Besides, I'm sure you did tons of research before you let a guy plant one on you."

She gave him a withering look and stuffed her Atom Building and You copy into her book bag a little more forcefully than she meant. "That's not true; my first kiss was totally a surprise. And no one really _invented_ kissing. Did you know it takes twenty muscles working cooperatively? Some cultures consider it an intimate gesture, while others find it a disgusting germ-swapping practice."

He shrugged, seemingly uninterested and unimpressed. (_He_ was the one who'd asked in the first place.) "I just figured you might know something about it, because you're normal. (He paused to rethink his words, so that he didn't dig himself into another hole.) I mean, don't get me wrong, Tina, Kim, and Bex are great; Eva too, but all of their parents are spies."

She raised her eyebrows, not knowing where he was going with this. "Well, there's a story in Greek mythology about two lovers who shared the first kiss to transfer a beautiful stone, effectively keeping the god Pan from getting his greedy hands on it. You aren't trying to come up with another pickup line, are you?"

He laughed as she washed out some vials with goopy looking purple _stuff._ (He was still glad he'd chosen fieldwork. Unknown compounds gave him the creeps.) "No, just a little experiment I want to try. Why? Do you think it would work?"

She ignored his question about the pickup line. "Experiment? What do you need me for?" she furiously scrubbed at a vial with a steel wool scrubber. The goop was_ totally_ harder to get off than it looked.

"Yeah, an experiment," he paused to shoot her a meaningful look. "Every good scientist knows you have to have a good foundation to make good intuitive leaps."

"You've been hanging out with me too much lately," she ducked her head in hopes that he wouldn't see her smile.

"What? Why? Because I want to try an experiment? Let me tell you, I am so much more than a field agent." She ignored him puffing out his (rock solid) chest and picked up another vial to rinse under the running water.

"No, because you just said intuitive leaps. Your vocabulary skills are over-reaching you there, buddy."

"No need to stroke my ego, Miss Eager Beaver."

"You don't need your ego stroked, you goose. It's already going to spontaneously combust one day due to its abnormally large size. And the only thing I'm interested in is if you've come to any conclusions."

He slid from the lab table to simply lean back against it. "Well, kissing is either a learned behavior or instinctual."

She looked at him expectantly. "And your hypothesis is…?"

"It's instinctual." (He wondered if she would accept it in non-scientific form. Some scientists could focus _way_ too much on the pedantic.).

"Oh." She pondered it for a moment, her face screwing up like when she was puzzling out one of the chemistry equations she could do in her head. "I'd have to disagree. From the minute a baby is exposed to the world, he or she is subjected to kissing. The baby is kissed, animals around it are kissed, and the baby sees his or her parents kiss. We see it in books, movies…What's more natural than to kiss back? That's what I felt when Robbie Lane- as you so eloquently put it- planted one on me at the playground."

She turned off the water and reached for a cloth to dry off the cleaned glasses. "You've thought about this a lot, haven't you?"

He shrugged. "When you're in a school full of girls (_just you_, he meant), it's hard _not_ to think about it."

The glasses squeaked when she wiped them with the cloth.

"Have you ever thought that maybe there's some part of us that craves physical contact?" he asked, watching how she shook her head. (Pause; new approach) "How old were you?"

"Excuse me?" she glanced up at him, noting how he'd moved closer when she was rambling. She wondered if he'd noticed how her Southern accent had jumped a pitch or two.

"How old were you when Robbie Lane kissed you on the playground?"

She thought for a moment. "I was nine; he was ten."

"That doesn't count, you two were still kids."

"Kids? I could run off the periodic table of elements and make chemical compounds, albeit simple ones, at age eight!"

"I'm sure you could, Liz, but the point is, at nine, you were still emotionally a kid. Doesn't count."

She pursed her lips a little in a pout. "So what counts?"

"Seventh grade, summer before I went to Blackthorne, I kissed Ava McKinsey behind the bleachers at a football game. Somehow her head jammed into my lip and it got all bloody. Mom thought I'd gotten into a fight, and I was too embarrassed to tell her otherwise."

"Did you ever kiss her again?" (It wasn't nosing, just polite disinterest).

"Oh, uh, no. Not after I met Alexia Hollings at the pool." He grinned sheepishly at Liz's questioning eye. "What? She had a better body!"

"Thank you for never failing to remain below my already low expectations of the male gender," she noted sarcastically, throwing the damp towel she used to dry the vials with into the laundry bin.

"What? No, don't think of it that way! Not all men are like that, and that was just a phase I was going through." He was moving closer, and she was feeling warmer. Did that mean he was getting closer to the prize? "Was that your only kiss? Robbie Lane at the playground, I mean."

She leaned against the lab table, chipping away at the nail polish on her nails. (Macey would yell at her later). "No, there were a few others, but not too many. I go to an all girls school, you know. All I'm saying is that kissing is a learned behavior. Just look at the apes, for example-"

"I'm glad you equate us with the apes." She didn't fail to notice him rolling his eyes.

"I'm surprised you're saying that about a species we share copious amounts of DNA with, Grant. Of course I'd mention the primates. Some anthropologists believe kissing is actually a learned behavior left over from our primate days of grooming. You know, the scientific name for the whole shebang is actually osculation."

Her stomach tightened with that stupid (charming) smile of his. (Not to even mention how his chuckle at her word choice made her stomach drop to her knees). "I don't care about primates."

"You don't?" Her brow furrowed in confusion. "Then this whole experiment needs re-evaluating, because if you don't want to deal with primates, you're going to have to take a different angl-"

Kiss.

_Pull_. His two warm hands rested on her waist, and for a moment, she didn't object when he pulled her close.

**Push**. Her hands were on his (rock) solid chest, pushing him away. She wanted him no closer.

"So, change your mind about the experiment?" he asked, letting a hand go to the back of his neck.

She glared, un-amused. (Was that even a word?). "What about Bex?"

He'd gotten what she'd played at. "We're not together, Liz. So what about Bex?"

"And the others?" She wasn't about to be fooled right under her nose.

"What others? Liz, I'm seeing no one right now!" (Oops, he hadn't meant for that to sound so much like a groan.) "No one except you."

"Literally," she smiled at her own joke before a thought dawned on her. "Did you really have an experiment on your mind or was that just a ploy? Did you need me to explain those chemistry problems to you all of those nights?"

"No, those were just the strong guy's plans to get the smart girl." He was smirking. (A trademark of Blackthorne's, it seemed).

While she was blushing at his flattery, he added as an afterthought, "But I still want to know. Learned or instinct?"

"I'm not sure. Another test might need to be in order," she offered, tentatively reaching to put her arms around his neck.

Before he could pull her in closer, her feathery lips pressed against his in an innocent gesture. He opened his mouth and tasted the daisies and fresh red apples of _her_, swearing he hadn't experienced anything sweeter than oxygen before this.

When she pulled away, he could have skipped from hypothesis to conclusion on the instinct theory (she would tell him it was a proposition; there wasn't enough factual support to really call it a theory yet). She, on the other hand, looked at him thoughtfully and stated, "I think that was it."

"What was what?" he quizzed in an unsteady attempt to follow her logic.

"You said Robbie's kiss didn't count, so I think that that was my first kiss."

He grinned down at her. (There's a certain claim to be a girl's first kiss).

"Instinctively, I mean. The others were probably just learned behavioral responses." He pictured the wheels turning in that big brain of hers as she opened her mind to another possibility. "Maybe it's both. We kiss because we've seen it before, but from there it's instinct."

He wished she would just speak plain English.

She inhaled a breath. "But if you'd asked me, I probably would have said yes. You didn't have to come up with some whole stupid experiment just to impress me."

"I wasn't trying to impress you; I was trying to kiss you."

"So kiss me, you silly boy."

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